It’s nice to be back. Beach time has been rare in recent years since the State of California kicked us out of our beach trailer Sangri-la at Crystal Cove. (What me, bitter and vengeful?)

Beach time is fungible. Breakfast can be as late as you want. Cocktail hour starts when it wants to. Bedtime is optional. Only nap time verges on the mandatory.

After intense observation, I’ve concluded that I’m beach old, which is different than town old. We live in an old zip code. Here, many more people look like our grandchildren than look like us.

Even the grizzled surfer dudes look young.

People here are tan and fit looking. They don’t have wrinkles or age spots. And a lot of bodies, and a lot of the body, are on display. The Harvard water polo team was training in front of our place. All their bodies were cast from the same mold.

Braces and bandages appear to be from sports injuries rather than the train wreck of time.

The surf’s up this week, pounding waves and red flags on the lifeguard towers. Pound old people’s face in the sand. Old gets no respect here.

Water’s warmest I’ve experienced: comfortable on the skin, a hazard for the planet.

Some things haven’t changed much.

Fellowship is rediscovered. Screen time is replaced by old fashioned board and card games, that yield the discovery that the grandchildren have become canny strategists, and they also collude. No pity for old people around the Tripoley board.

The ferry still runs from Balboa to Newport, Gina’s pizza is still addictive, dolphins migrate and amaze us, and sunsets are magnificent.

This is not the most spiritual beach in the world, not one of those magnetic places, but the nightly ritual of looking up from the dinner table and watching the orange disk disappear behind the lifeguard stand reminds us of the continuity of life.

Posted on | July 9, 2018 | Comments Off on A 4th of July Salute to a Courageous Judge: Remembering Paul Egly

My friend Dick Johnson sent along a “what should we celebrate” list for July 4. It includes “the waves of immigrants from all parts of the world who struggled to accept each other and find a place in this country,” escaped slaves and their allies, working people who championed reforms and the right to organize, women who expanded our understanding of their gender, and gays and lesbians who fought for and won the right to marry. The list goes on, and we’re encouraged to raise a fork at the dinner table in salute.

I’d like to raise my fork in celebration of courageous judges, one in particular, Paul Egly, who died this week at age 97. Egly oversaw the Los Angeles school desegregation case. He took the case as a well liked judge and rapidly became what the L.A. Times called “one of the most unpopular judges in Southern California.” The judge who initially ruled in the case was voted out of office and Egly faced a recall and multiple death threats. Egly did worry about voter opposition and an angry public, but as he told the Times in 1977, “I have been a judge for a long time, and a judge’s job is to judge.”

I met him a couple of times as he tried to get the parties in the L.A. integration case to work toward a mutually agreed solution. They wouldn’t. Other judges had fallen into the trap of mandating a solution and virtually taking over the management of a school district. I remember one lunch where he said, “What if I, say ‘integrate this way,’ and the district says, ‘up yours judge.’ What do I do then?”

The politics of race ultimately swamped his efforts. In 1980, California voters approved an initiative barring mandatory busing to integrate schools, one of the primary means of integration available in Los Angeles. When the state Supreme Court upheld the law, Egly recused himself from the case.

The politics of race dominated the L.A. school district for at least another decade, and its schools remain highly segregated.

Egly’s life and work reminds us that judges are called on to solve the problems of today. Conservative or liberal, they can’t dodge that obligation. Judges will always have to operate out of the public’s comfort zone, and out of their own. Regardless of what litmus tests voters or politicians use to choose them, they will soon face situations that fail to fit their preconceptions or easy remedies. That’s when judging becomes courageous, or not.

Posted on | April 19, 2018 | Comments Off on It’s More Than Resistance to Trump

I once interviewed a candidate for a junior professorship who explained her ability to churn out research as, “I can drill a one inch hole to the center of the earth faster than anyone.” How utterly unlike my style and technique, I thought. I wander and explore. I graze and synthesize. That’s happening now.

Several weeks ago, I started to write a piece—maybe an op-ed—about California politics. This initial intent may be morphing into something larger, longer, maybe more academic.

The national press, in particular, has styled California as the home of resistance to all things Trump. It is. At last count Atty. General Javier Bacerra has sued the Trump Administration 27 times, and the state is employing high powered legal talent to push back against the President and U.S. Atty. General Jeff Sessions. And the state has a lot to push back with. As Gov. Jerry Brown jibed to Sessions, “we’re going to be in court a lot longer than you are going to be in office.”

California Counter-Narrative

But as the pitchman on television says, “wait; there’s more.” California will resist long and hard, and on many fronts, but focusing only on resistance misses the point. I believe California is creating a counter-narrative: a vastly different idea about what our nation should be and how it should be governed.

It’s relatively straightforward to demonstrate the state’s alternative path in policy direction: in education, the environment, immigration, incarceration, and the right to vote, for example. California’s policies in these areas—including differences with the previous Democratic administration—were in place before Trump was president or even a candidate.

More difficult—and the reason that this project has become an exploration rather than a one inch hole to the center of the earth—is describing how the structures of political power and participation have changed, and why California may be breaking a path for the country.

Crossroads of Dreaming and Doing

The answer I’m exploring lies at the crossroads of doing and dreaming. There has always been a California Dream. It’s been a different dream over time, but there has always been something special about the state: a saga, a story we tell ourselves and others that is ultimately connected to how we govern ourselves. In a recent interview, Brown admonished readers to be loyal to the “idea” of California.

Iterations of that idea have driven the state. Historian Victor Silverman notes that, “California was not discovered; it was invented.” If we drill down, we will find that the current political struggles with the Trump administration are just regressive fights, and the interesting edge of politics are the struggles within the state about how to move forward. It is not whether people should have a guarantee of health care, for example, but whether the state should embrace a single payer plan, and if so how. It is not about whether Dreamers should stay, but how to best create a comprehensive approach to immigration reform and what a state can do when the national government has so dramatically failed to create workable immigration policy.

In its recent public policy directions, California extends the three historic interlocking themes that Silverman describes that I believe put the state on the leading edge of America:
• How people interact with the environment: the climate, land, water, creatures.
• How conflicts between people with vastly different power resources are resolved.
• How dreams are met and disappointments dealt with.

In future posts, I will write more about this work in process, and I’ll ask your comments and advice.

Posted on | February 9, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Dreamers’ Find Allies Among Their Teachers

Teachers in California, where 270,000 undocumented Dreamer students reside, have quietly formed alliances with their students as tension mounts over their ability to stay in the United States.

For the most part, these students were brought to this country as young children by parents who were fleeing war, civil strife, or poverty in Mexico or Central America. They have been raised as Americans, but despite widespread support for a pathway to legal residency and citizenship they now fear deportation following Donald Trump’s announced intent to revoke the DACA program that gave them a legal toehold.

Teachers are these students’ first responders. They are there when kids break down in tears, when they have anxiety attacks, when they simply don’t know what to do. The PBS Newshour told part of the story recently (video above).

Last year, I watched as teachers from the Humanitas Social Justice Academy, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, sat in a circle around their former students who were now enrolled in UCLA. These are kids who did everything right. They studied hard, avoided teenage pitfalls, and gained admission to a highly selective university. And they were sobbing. In the middle of a public meeting, where they had gathered to talk about their high school experience, the emotional pressure of their clouded legal status brought them to the point of emotional collapse. They cried for themselves. They cried for their little sisters and brothers. They cried for their parents.

Now, these teachers have a place to gather, learn, and gain support. The Claremont Graduate University, where I am an emeritus professor, has started an “Allies of Dreamers” certificate program for teachers. The program, “seeks to fill the growing demand for trained individuals who are committed to ensuring undocumented students are protected, fully integrated into K‐12 schools, and have the necessary support and preparation to access college and successfully transition to graduate school and the workforce.”

The program is in major part the work of my colleague, Will Perez. He has chronicled the lives of the Dreamers, and his book We Are Americans, published a decade ago, is one of the foundational documents in understanding these students. And the fact that nothing has happened in a decade to address the situation of 2.7-million young people is testimony to the brokenness of our political system.

Perez has also written about the Dreamers who were deported. These are kids who grew up American, who are now teenagers or young adults living in the land of their birth, which is not home but an alien place where they are not accepted or assisted.

I’m proud of the teachers who support the Dreamers, and I’m proud to be a part of a university that is trying to help them. But couldn’t we just get Congress to do something decent…or failing that just get a different Congress?

Posted on | January 30, 2018 | Comments Off on How To Make the Next LAUSD Superintendent Successful

The Los Angeles Unified School District is—once again—in search of a leader. There have been nine superintendents in the last two decades, much more turnover and change in direction than a thriving organization can withstand.

The school board is rightly concerned with more instability. In recent days, the notoriously fractious LAUSD board has been making nice, using words like “unanimous choice” and “partnership.” There’s a strong instinct to rush toward naming a permanent superintendent who can keep a steady hand on the tiller. But it’s the wrong instinct.

Before the nation’s second largest school district can create stability in its leadership ranks, the school board needs to create the conditions that will attract top talent and allow it to be successful. Conciliatory words are not enough.

A Mediator Shouldn’t Be Necessary

The first prerequisite for making the next superintendent successful is to stop the trench warfare over charter schools. The superintendent should not have to mediate between the rival factions as Michelle King was forced to do.

As long as the school board divides into pro and anti-charter school voting blocks, it will be unable to attract the talent it needs. Only a fool or someone with a messiah complex would accept a superintendency in a district where the board majority is likely to change after each election.

The back and forth board divisions are a clear signal of dysfunctional and toxic politics. School board races have become personal, petty, and very pricey: $114 a vote in one of last spring’s contests. These bitter elections spill over into low trust day-to-day relationships among members.

Board members may think that continuing the fight is to their political benefit. One might assume the interest groups that supported them will finance their next campaign. Don’t be too sure. LAUSD is not the federal government. Here, continuing displays of dysfunction are likely to be punished in a “throw all the clowns out” election campaign.

I believe there is a way to end the fight and claim the huge peace dividend of a redesigned public school system. Oddly enough, stopping the fight and claiming the peace dividend can be accomplished with the same three policies, all of which can be put in place by the board without the permission of state or national governments. Read more

Posted on | January 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Go, Visit the Whitney Plantation

I’m delighted to see that the Whitney Plantation, just upriver from New Orleans, is getting the attention it deserves. Shortly after it opened, I wrote about the plantation devoted exclusively to telling the story of slavery in my EdWeek column ‘On California.’

Now the Whitney is making lists of “must-see” places for 2018. “These destinations may inspire you,” the L.A. Times headlines.

Cast aside thoughts of soft-accented guides in period costume providing testimony to what promotional material calls the South’s Golden Age. At the Whitney Plantation there is noromanticism, no glorification of the Confederacy’s “lost cause”. Expect to be moved, educated, horrified, and perhaps motivated.

Long before #MeToo, the young lady represented standing by her master’s bed became the origin of the dual family tree of the plantation’s 19th Century owners. One family tree is black; the other white.

Posted on | January 8, 2018 | Comments Off on Nomadland: Exploring America’s Mobile Army of Older Workers

Jessica Bruder’s superbly-crafted book about wandering workers pitches itself as a mixture of resilience and economic fragility, of strong wills and empty gas tanks. It is that, certainly, and more. It’s a jumping off point for a reflection on how America got to the place that a RV army of at least 20,000 roams the country in search of often unpleasant temporary low-wage jobs. For them, bad jobs and insecurity are replacing retirement as we have idealized it.

There are younger people who live in their cars, families who raise their children without a permanent address, and those who use cars, vans, and trucks as stations on the way to or from living on the streets. These are all important parts of a larger economic story, and Bruder’s reportage brilliantly links economic insecurity with older Americans who put a lifetime of work into an economic system that failed them.

We don’t meet any bums or shiftless septuagenarians in the pages of Nomadland. Linda May, the protagonist, was a small business owner and held many other jobs before being wiped out in the Great Recession. Others had toiled for name-brand corporations for decades before being downsized, displaced, and often divorced.

The pages of Nomadland take us from National Forest campgrounds, where these mostly white senior citizens work as campground hosts for $9.50 an hour plus a free campsite. For this, they check people in, validate their permits, clean up after they leave, swab out toilets, and undertake minor and unofficial police work. The work force shifts to the sugar beet harvest in Minnesota and North Dakota, and in the fall run-up to Christmas it labors in Amazon fulfillment centers around the country, where what the company calls CamperForce is a substantive part of Amazon’s business model.

Housing is expensive

These folks are not living this lifestyle because of a lust for the open road, at least the vast majority of them aren’t, even though in first interviews people told Bruder that they “chose” vehicular vagrancy. This mostly white, mostly over-60 work force, is living in RV’s, aging commercial vans, and vehicles of all descriptions because living on the road is their best option. Housing is expensive.

As Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in their Own Land, writes in her review that there are only 12 counties and one metro area in the United States where someone working full time for minimum wage can afford market rent on a one-bedroom apartment. Leaving rent, utilities, and attached housing expenses behind is a shrewd response to economic disaster. As the campers parked on streets in Silicon Valley cities, and even New York City testify, employed people, even graduate students, resort to rubber tired housing.

Ingenious, but inherently temporary. Linda May longs her environmentally sustainable “earthship,” and at the end of the book she is building it. But others exit harsh RV living the old-fashioned way; they die. Some disappear. Others talk about driving off a cliff Thelma and Louise style or just driving out in the desert and giving up. “So while I think it does feel like an escape and there’s a degree to which people feel really liberated in the moment by it, it’s not – it’s not a long-term solution,” Bruder said.

In a L.A. Times op-ed, Journalist Candice Reed writes of loving the life she and her husband share in a 1984 28-footer, “The full-time RV life isn’t always easy, and things don’t always go as planned, but living on the fly has brought us closer together and given us an opportunity to wake up to something new every day.” But the capacity to thrive is conditioned on, “a small nest-egg saved for whichever one of us goes into a nursing home first, and we don’t touch it — not for new tires, engine repairs or wine.”

The nest egg is small

But the egg in the nest is small. As Teresa Ghilarducci reminds us in When I’m Sixty-Four, her book about the undermining of traditional pensions, the average 401k of someone near retirement age is about $50,000. About 70 percent of Americans will rely on Social Security for the majority of their retirement income.

Retirement is a relatively new concept. Self-sufficiency in retirement newer, and an age in which retirees enjoy wealth and celebrate the fruits of their labor on cruise ships newer still. But the goal of universal self-sufficiency in retirement appears lost, and it is entirely possible that the nomads that Bruder writes about are the leading edge of old age living and not temporary fallout of the 2008 economic collapse. Recent polls indicate that only 17 percent of Americans think that they will be able to afford to stop working. And 10,000 of the Boomer generation reach age 65 every week.

In retirement, as in working income, America has become profoundly less equal. Instead of a dream of a modest but universal retirement—those two-bedroom houses that dot St. Pete and other Florida cities—the gap grows between RV nomads scraping to fill their gas tanks and those weighing which travel brochure to respond to.

Bruder’s book presents a picture of resilience and the kind of economic self-sufficiency long characteristic of Americans, but eventually all of us, even the most resilient need help. Minds and bodies decline, and we all become dependent. Eventually, we will need the social safety net. The systematic elimination of traditional pensions and the underfunding of alternatives throws the spotlight back on the social safety net of Social Security and Medicare.

So, do not be surprised if the nomads converge on Washington this year.

Posted on | December 28, 2017 | Comments Off on Here’s The Peace Dividend In Los Angeles Charter School Wars

Learning from L.A., our book about institutional change in public education, was published a decade ago. Then, we saw charter schools as a logical force in the transition of an institution built for the industrial age to one designed for the 21st Century.

Instead, in the space of a decade, charter schools in Los Angeles morphed from a highly popular innovation to a political wedge issue. One’s favorability toward charters has become a political litmus test for school board elections, and efforts to regulate them have become front-page news. Plans to replace traditional, district-run schools with charters have been characterized as bringing the district to a tipping point. The question is “tipping to where”?

In the case of the Los Angeles Unified School District, “where” depends on how the ongoing battles over charter schools intersect with two realities.

First, the nation’s second largest school system is in the midst of profound institutional change. LAUSD is not a failed school district. It is not an unchanging monolith. It is an institution that is struggling to reshape itself, moving from early 20th Century assumptions about how to organize teaching and learning to a form better suited to our times. Often it does this unknowingly, because for the most part people within LAUSD have a strong institutional culture but a very weak institutional memory. They don’t spend a lot of time trying to understand how they got to where they are.

Second, the politics surrounding the school district are dysfunctional. Simply put: the politics we’ve got won’t get us the schools we need. Instead of crisis resolution we have gridlock, obscenely expensive trench warfare, and politics that turn our attention away from solutions that are staring us in the face.

Because charter schools have become the wedge issue in politics, it is through the politics surrounding them that a new district will emerge.

The linked paper develops this theme of working through the charter school politics as a way of finding a way forward for the Los Angeles Unified School District, and perhaps by extension for American public education. Also, see this ‘On California’column and others linked to it.

A few weeks ago in France I looked at a 30,000 year-old outline of a human hand, not unlike the ones that children in school draw today. This hand had been carefully placed on the side of a cave we call Pech Merle in the Lot Valley. Then someone blew red ocher through a hollow bone to airbrush one of the earliest deceptions of a human.

Something caused these early humans to wander deep in caves, paint pictures of animals, and then pause to give recognition to themselves. Was it worship as some have suggested? Our guide Magen O’Farrell cautioned us that it is impossible for contemporary humans to know the minds of the people we call Cro-Magnons.

Still, hands carry part of our story. Recently, I took a picture of my hand and wondered at the age spots, the bumps from arthritis, the places where bones had been broken or bent, and the little spots that might turn to cancer.

And because we carry an urge to communicate our story to others, sometimes excessively (see Facebook), we can look back perhaps 1,200 generations before a Christ and feel kinship with someone else who pictured her hand. Because the language of the artists is unknown to us, all we can do is wonder and be captured by a sense of awe and connectedness.

Unanswered questions linger. The world was cold then, how did you keep warm? Were you happy? Did you have kids? Am I one of them?

Posted on | September 13, 2017 | Comments Off on Retirement 075, a Remedial Course

Retirement 075

This is a remedial course for students who have previously experienced a lack of success with retirement. It is to be expected that an intensive review of the basics will be necessary as well as modeling and intervention by those who have been successful in separating themselves from employment. This is a year-long course, and it can be repeated if necessary.

The course meets on Fridays at 4 in whatever watering hole I choose.

It covers such important topics as: shedding prior commitments, listening to your muse, and the proper construction of a bucket list.

Recent Projects

Currently Reading

About

Charles Taylor Kerchner is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Claremont Graduate University. My daily musings appear in the blog. The archives of my EdWeek blog are available via link under the 'On California' head. Some of my photography can be seen by clicking on 'Gallery.' And numerous links to academic work and other research and commentary can be found by clicking on 'Projects.'